Oh joy! I’ve been waiting for the week when my plastic waste would finally fit easily in my own two hands, and this was that week. Don’t get me wrong. We still have plastic in this house that we’re using up, and the tally will go up again. But it’s nice to savor small victories.
Items used this week but purchased before the plastic project began:
- Approximately 7 feet of packing tape. I pulled this tape off an old box I cut up to use to make a barrier to keep kitties from chewing electrical cords. In fact, I’m so tickled with Michael’s and my ingenuity, I’m gonna post photos of the setup below.
New plastic waste:
- 2 Refresh Endura single-use eye drop containers
Now, here’s my plastic-free kitty project for the week. I needed a way to keep the kittens from getting to the tangled mass of electrical cords behind our TV/stereo stand. I wish I had a before picture to show you. It was a real mess back there and the kitties loved it.
Lots of people were recommending I get one of those plastic cord covers, but a plastic cord cover is made from, you know, plastic. I tried making a jalapeno pepper spray and coating the cords with it to keep them from chewing, but it didn’t really work. The only good solution would be a physical barrier. The problem was that the TV stand was open on all 4 sides, and the cats would basically dive through. Here’s what the front looks like now.
I know the cardboard doesn’t look so great, but really only the cats can see it. I had to lie on the floor to take the picture. From an adult human vantage-point, it’s not very noticeable. So anyway, the cats can’t get through to the back very easily. But they still could climb over if there were enough enticement, like lots of loose tangled cords. So this is what I did in the back:
The shoe box was Michael’s idea. There are holes in the bottom through which the cords come up from under the stand. The Smart Strip Power Strip, which I wrote about in a previous post, wouldn’t completely fit in the box. But that’s okay because having it stick out makes accessing the switch easier. The cardboard is attached using brown paper tape, which we already had. Any other cords that were loose or dangly I tried to find a way to tape down… tape to the wall, to back of the TV, to whatever. There’s still one loose cord leading to a speaker, but it’s in the back and so far they haven’t noticed it.
This might not be the most beautiful solution in the world, but it required no new materials to construct and so far is working just fine. I haven’t caught either of them back there since I set it up on Monday, which is the point.
